The Secret (The Evolution Of Sin Book 2)

by Giana Darling

  “What would you say then?” he said in that quiet voice that echoed through my entire body.

  I swallowed hard before answering. “You’re more than the reason behind one smile. You hold the lease on my happiness.”

  The tick in his jaw was the only sign of his shock. He stared at me for a long time, caging me against the island with his arms braced on either side of me.

  “I want to own your happiness,” he said, finally.

  I sucked in so much air my lungs expanded to the point of pain.

  “I want you to own me,” I whispered.

  We had never been this forthright and even though it felt good, scary and good, scary good, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea.

  Sinclair shook his head and a piece of his newly shorn hair fell across his forehead. My fingers itched to smooth it back but I resisted because despite our sexual proclivities we didn’t have the casual kind of intimacy that came from dating.

  So instead, I watched the battle in his eyes as he fought between taking me right there on the stool and storming out of the apartment, never to return. It was overdramatic maybe, but in a situation like ours, nothing was understated.

  “I do,” he said, in a tight voice because there wasn’t enough air in his lungs.

  Hope – the scrappy kind that you fight for with every pounding beat of your heart – can leave you breathless like that.

  I shook my head, mute with emotion, but he pressed a finger to my lips.

  “I own you in the dark. The moment you turn off the lights, I own your thoughts and your body. I dictate your touch.” His hand skimmed too lightly down the exposed skin between the panels of my shirt. “When you touch yourself it is because I want you to. You’re only echoing my thoughts in the dark, reading my will from across the city. So perfectly obedient. And after you come, my name on your sweet lips like a prayer, you’ll dream of me because the entire night is ours and I won’t give you up for one second of it.”

  I was hot and cold with arousal but tears still pressed at my eyes. “I’ll still wake up alone.”

  His eyes softened and the hand that had been tickling the upper swell of my breasts moved up to take a firm hold at the base of my neck. It was almost scary how both actions brought me utter calm.

  “Greedy girl,” he teased, but when I didn’t smile, his grip flexed tight. “There isn’t much more of me to take.”

  Only the part of you in Elena’s grip, I thought. But even that poignant reminder didn’t hold the same weight it had as little as two weeks ago. I was turning into a different kind of person, one that didn’t care about the consequences of my desires. I couldn’t tell if it was devolution or not. Only the fittest survive, and only those with the selfishness to go after their ambitions succeed.

  “Your eggs are cold.”

  He ducked down to press a kiss above his grip on my neck, right on my jumping pulse, before releasing me.

  I stared down at the yellow curds without thinking while he cleaned up in the kitchen and came around to sit beside me with his own breakfast. His hand fell heavily onto my thigh, jerking me out of my trance, but when I looked up, he was focused on his tablet, rapidly reading and responding to a deluge of emails. The hand was a reminder of his authority, his presence lest I forget it, and it released me from my worries the way nothing else could.

  Happily, I dug into my cold eggs.

  We ate silently and even when I squirmed to relieve the tension at my pleasantly raw core, he only had to squeeze my leg to relay his satisfaction with my discomfort and his will for me to sit still. It was the intimacy of our secret tryst merging seamlessly, beautifully like a watercolor sunset, into something more mundane but just as meaningful. It felt really, really good.

  When I was done with the eggs, I made us both another coffee and retrieved my sketchbook before sitting down again. My mind was beautifully vacant, the kind of mental state artists strive for but only the best are capable of achieving on a regular basis, and I wanted to take advantage of it. My pencil twisted over the paper in loose, languid strokes.

  I wasn’t surprised when something distinctly sexual emerged from the grey mass of swirls but I was by the dark taint of the image, the stark disobedience of it. A woman with shadowy hair that wrapped around her arousal swollen flesh like bindings yelled across the page, her mouth invitingly wide but dangerous, temperamental.

  I realized as I stared at her, that she was me. This woman who dared you to fuck her, dominate her and then dared those who would condemn her to resist her charms. It was so ironic that the more sexually powerful I became, the more I wanted someone to leash me.

  “What are your plans for the day?” Sinclair said.

  He had been watching me. I knew because I had harnessed that scorching gaze and locked it around the fierce woman in my drawing.

  “I need to paint.”

  “Of course, you’re exhibition is in two weeks.”

  I stared at him for a second. “I didn’t think you knew.”

  He frowned at me. “Elle, not only is it my business to know about the goings on at my gallery, but it is your first show in America. I assure you, the date has been noted on my calendar since it was decided upon.”

  I smudged the shadowy lock of hair falling over my drawn woman’s face with my thumb and mumbled, “I just remember you saying that you didn’t want anything to do with it.”

  He sighed and a second later my stool was tugged towards him, so that I was between his spread legs. His fingers threaded through my hair and tilted my head until I was looking up into his eyes. Instantly, I relaxed as my ricocheting thoughts bounced against his palms and slunk back into my skull like chastised dogs.

  “How can you be so confident under my hands and otherwise so unsure? Giselle, I said that because you had upset me. You came into my office looking gorgeous and unflappable and then this soft-spoken woman told me to go to hell.”

  I blushed because that had been a little unfair. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “We both said a lot of things we didn’t mean that day.”

  I felt the hook that connected my heart to his sink deeper into my left aorta.

  “I do not want to stop seeing you.”

  My eyes fluttered close to better savor those edible words. When I opened them, his lips were ever so slightly tilted in a bemused smile.

  “We see each other all the time,” I reminded him.

  Just because his admission made me ecstatic didn’t mean I was going to be an easy catch.

  His gaze narrowed. “It’s difficult to play hard to get when you’ve already told me that you are in love with me.”

  I bristled, but he did have a point. Instead of answering, I gathered our dirty dishes and put them in the dishwasher, taking my time as I did so, completely avoiding his burning stare. I was just walking past him to grab my sketchbook when he grabbed me around the waist and tugged me between his legs, wrapping his limbs around me so that I was trapped.

  “Get off me,” I ordered in my haughtiest voice.

  “Don’t feel like it.”

  “Sinclair,” I said, laughter seeping into my tone. “Tu es con, let me go!”

  “Nope, maybe if I keep you captive long enough you will remember that time you said you loved me. In fact, I think you said it multiple times.”

  I rolled my eyes and even though he couldn’t see me do it, he gave me a tight squeeze.

  “I have no idea to what you are referring.”

  His fingers dug into my sides and began to tickle. I writhed in his grip as laughter exploded from my lips, huge unfeminine guffaws that made my entire body shake.

  “Stop… please… Sin,” I begged breathlessly, tears streaming down my face.

  He spun me around in his arms, smiling that boyish smile that made my heart forget to function.

  “I want you to tell me again,” he explained, pouting adorably.

  Part of me was floating near the ceiling, buoyed by his good humor and obvious affection, while the
other part, smaller than a sandbag, kept me tethered to the earth. I cupped his achingly handsome face in my hands because it made me feel better about what I had to say.

  “Daniel.” He flinched slightly but I tightened my hands on his cheeks. “I haven’t asked you to leave Elena, and I’m not going to. I have no right to ask you and I can promise you right now, I will never ask you that. But in return, I need you to promise me that you will never ask me if I love you, again. I can deal with this.” I rolled my head around to indicate our fucked up situation in the most eloquent way I knew how. “With Elena keeping you, but only if you let me keep a part of myself to myself.”

  I sighed heavily, took a moment to collect my thoughts and project them clearly through my gaze when I met his eye again.

  “You could take it.” I thumped my chest. “You could take everything I am and, you know what? A part of me wants that like crazy.”

  His hands found my hips and rested there, just gently on the curve. I was grateful for it because he was letting me know that he understood what I was trying to say.

  “But I have to be realistic even if I don’t want to be. You aren’t going to leave Elena and I refuse to put my heart in a cage I don’t have the key to open.”

  His lips were screwed tight like a lid over the emotions bubbling up at his center. I could see some of it rise to the surface of his gaze but he was looking over my shoulder, shielding most of it from me.

  I swallowed hard and decided to throw in the last of my grenades. “Also, I have a lunch date today.”

  His eyes snapped to me, flashing like neon lights. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.”

  His hands flexed painfully on my waist but the silence was worse than the physical discomfort. It stretched long and torturous before us like a road littered with mines.

  “You’re going to sit across from another man when your ass is still sore from my hand?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “You’re going to go home to my sister when your hand is still sore from my ass?”

  Fury emanated from him like dry ice and I instantly regretted my barb.

  I sighed. “Sin, it’s just a lunch date. Elena basically insisted on setting us up and I wanted to seem like a normal girl, one who was interested in other men.” I laughed a little. “We both know who I would rather be with.”

  “Do we?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  But he wasn’t. He sat utterly rigid on the stool and his eyes had been reduced to icy shields.

  “I want to be with you,” I said slowly and maybe a little condescendingly, because I thought it was blindingly obvious.

  His jaw clenched and he stared me hard for a long moment before standing up and stalking away to the balcony doors.

  “Sin?” I stayed where I was because I wasn’t sure how to deal with an angry Frenchmen even after all my time in Paris.

  He continued to stare broodingly out the window. In only his low-slung jeans with the sunlight kissing his skin, he looked like stolen art, something far too glorious to ever belong to me.

  “You cut a dashing figure standing there but maybe you could talk to me?” I asked as I scooted onto a stool to make myself comfortable while I waited.

  He looked over his shoulder at me but his face was cast in shadow. “Come here.”

  I slid off the stool before I could even process his request and I hesitated when I realized how easily my body revealed his dominion over me. He was in front of me before I could make a decision one way or another, his fingers sinking into the hair over my ears while his thumbs tilted my chin up.

  “I have done nothing in my life to deserve you, Elle. Absolutely nothing. I’ve fought to be a good person when it is not in my nature to be kind or good, not like you.” He shook his head and his thumb brushed against my lower lip. “I do not deserve to hold something so precious in my hands.”

  I turned my head, dislodging one of his hands so I could kiss his palm, leaving the imprint of my love for him like a lucky coin. I closed his fist over it and held it with both my hands. There was no way to articulate the toxic cocktail of emotions rolling churlishly through my veins and if I couldn’t, my enigmatic Frenchman probably couldn’t either.

  Besides, we hadn’t really spoken about where we would go from here but as it stood, this was my last morning as Daniel Sinclair’s lover and I wanted to make the most of it.

  “Can I show you something?” I asked, as my girlish excitement made me bounce on my toes.

  Without waiting for his answer, I turned around to grab the large canvas tilted to the left of the French doors. My heart trilled with nerves as I turned to prop it on the easel. I avoided looking back at Sinclair as I stepped back into line with him so that he could see the painting unobstructed. It was the one I had been slaving over between my projects for the art gallery opening but I had only finished it yesterday.

  It was based on the sketch I had started in Mexico, the one with the two contrasting lovers a breath away from a kiss. It was my favorite piece in my growing collection because it was so clearly Sinclair and I, lost in the murky shadows but burning so brightly our features were nearly obscured in the blaze.

  I looked up at him, bouncing maniacally now, but his gorgeous face betrayed no emotions.

  “Well?”

  His lips twitched and he crossed his arms. “Well what, siren?” His grin broke free when I hip checked him. “It’s simply remarkable.”

  “You think?”

  He turned to face me, taking my hands in his so that he could stare down at them. My nails were industriously short and there were smudges of charcoal across the thumb and forefinger on my right hand from sketching earlier but Sinclair gazed down at them as if they were precious gems. He brushed each finger with his lips, slowly and reverently, before looking down into my eyes.

  “I know. You are extraordinarily gifted, Giselle, and beyond that, you are brave. Exploring the hidden side of lust and longing is not for the faint of heart,”

  “No,” I agreed, thinking of us. “It isn’t. But I’m hoping that it’s worth it in the end.”

  Chapter Fourteen.

  Apart from Mama’s, Prune was my favorite restaurant in New York, particularly for the insanely busy Sunday brunches so I was pleased when my blind date suggested the restaurant for our outing. I decided to walk there, even though it was on the opposite side of Manhattan and I had to say goodbye to Sinclair earlier than I wanted to. He had stayed overlong with me anyway, heading over three hours later than usual into the office. His tardiness delighted me.

  The Indian summer was finally ending and the breeze was cool between the tightly packed buildings but I welcomed it. Since Sinclair had left, my heart had stopped racing but my body was still flushed with the memory of his touch. My nipples scraped against the lacy material of my bra, sensitive from his mouth and the clothespins. In the aftermath of last night, my skin was so responsive that it was hard to resist the urge to touch the swell of my tastefully exposed breasts or the delicate inside of my wrists where Sinclair had nibbled just that morning.

  The only thing that intruded on my memories – apart from the occasional New Yorker’s elbow – was the prickly feeling at the base of my neck. At first, I thought it was a stray itch, one that I scratched until the skin was raw, but as I neared the restaurant the feeling grew until I was almost certain someone was following me. Looking over my shoulder and finding unfamiliar faces every time didn’t alleviate my growing anxiety.

  I pulled out my phone and dialed the first number on my speed dial.

  “Hello?” Cosima’s throaty voice was breathless. “Bambina, what is the matter?”

  “Would you think I was crazy if I said someone was following me?”

  There was a long pause and a vague cacophony on the other end of the line.

  “How long?”

  I exhaled loudly, grateful but unsurprised that she believed me. Cosima had always had a suspicious mind and given her close association
with the Camorra in Napoli and the black eyed Dante I knew she had experience with this kind of thing.

  “About fifteen minutes,” I guessed, walking a little more quickly as the heat of paranoia lit me on fire.

  “Okay,” Cosima spoke calmly but I could still hear the mess of her movements in the background and even the low register of a male voice. “Stay on a busy street. Where are you going?” I told her and she thought about it for a second before continuing, “I hope you are wearing something cute, bambina, you have been too lonely since your mystery lover in Mexico.”

  “Shouldn’t I cancel if someone really is following me?”

  “No, it’s best if you keep to your normal schedule and go to lunch. You should be fine once you get into the restaurant but call me before you leave.”

  There was more noise as she spoke with someone in the room with her. It could have been my imagination but I thought I heard a British accent.

  “I can’t be home for a while more and I don’t want you to be at the apartment alone,” she said. “So, I just texted Elena and you are going to stay there tonight.”

  “No,” I blurted out before I could stop myself.

  “Gigi, now isn’t the time to pull the sibling rivalry card. Mama is working tonight and Sebastian is in Toronto. Until we figure out what is going on, it is safer for you to stay with family.” She hesitated before adding, “There have been a few strange phone calls to the apartment. A man asked for you the first time, but otherwise it is always silent on the other line. Please, stay with Elena tonight and let me take care of this.”

  I chewed on my bottom lip as I focused on the pink awning of Prune in the distance. I really didn’t want to stay with Elena and her Daniel after I had just spent a remarkable night with my Sinclair. But I didn’t want to worry Cosima or be one of those stupid girls in horror films who goes against common logic and gets murdered.

  So, I promised Cosima I would and hung up just as my phone buzzed with an incoming text.