The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West

couldn’t say it. Not to the man who was the reason she knew that love could be beautiful instead of dark and twisted and sick. Not to the man who had made her feel so alive, so powerful, so perfect beneath his touch. “There are words, you know. Terrible words.”

      “None of which apply.” He thrust his hands in the pockets of that suit, and she wondered if he found it hard to keep them to himself. Was she as sick as he was if that made her feel better instead of worse? How could she tell anymore—what was the barometer? “You don’t have to do anything. I have no desire to force you. Quite the opposite.”

      “You told me I had to do this—to—to—”

      “Don’t stutter like the vestal virgin we both know you are not,” he said silkily, and she wondered if he’d forgotten that she’d been exactly that when she’d come to him ten years ago. If he thought that was another lie. “I told you that you had to obey me. In and out of bed.”

      “That I had to have sex with you at your command or leave,” she gritted out.

      He didn’t quite shrug, or smile. “Yes.”

      “So then I do, in fact, have to do something. You are perfectly happy to use force.”

      “Not at all.” He shrugged as if he didn’t care what happened next, but there was a tension to those muscled shoulders, around his eyes, that told her otherwise. And it wasn’t in the least bit comforting. “You’re welcome to leave. To say no at any time and go about your life, such as it is, using whatever name appeals to you. I won’t stop you.”

      It was as if her heart was in her mouth and she felt dizzy again, but she couldn’t look away from that terrible face of his, so sensual and impassive and cruel.

      “But if I do that, you’ll tell Violet who I am. You’ll tell her I...what? Stalked you? Deliberately hunted her down and befriended her to get to you?”

      “I will.” His face hardened and his voice did, too. “It has the added benefit of being the truth.”

      But Paige knew better, however little she could seem to express it to him. She knew what had grown between her and Violet in these past years, and how deeply it would wound the other woman to learn that Paige was yet one more leech. One more user, trying to suck Violet dry for her own purposes. It made her feel sick to imagine it.

      “That’s no choice at all.”

      “It’s a choice, Paige,” he said with lethal bite. “You don’t like it, perhaps, but that doesn’t make it any less of a choice, which is a good deal more than you offered me.”

      “I can’t hurt her. Don’t you care about that? Shouldn’t you?”

      “There are consequences to the choices you make,” he said with a certain ruthless patience. “Don’t you understand yet? This is a lesson. It’s not supposed to be fun.” That smile of his was a sharp blade she was certain drew blood. “For you.”

      For a moment she thought she’d bolt, though it was a long walk to anywhere from high up on this hill. She didn’t know how she kept herself still, how she stayed in one piece. She didn’t know how she wasn’t already in a thousand shattered bits all over this little pull out on the side of the deserted road, like a busted-out car window.

      “Tell me, then,” she managed after a moment, keeping her head high, though her eyes burned, “how does this lesson plan work, exactly? You say you don’t want to force me, but you’re okay with me forcing myself? When it’s the last thing I want?”

      “Is it?” He shook his head at her, that smile of his no less painful. “Surely you must realize how little patience I have for lies, Paige.” He let out a small sound that was too lethal to be a laugh. “If I were to lift your dress and stroke my way inside your panties, what would I find? Disinterest?”

       Damn him.

      “That’s not the point. That’s biology, which isn’t the same thing as will.”

      “Are you wet?”

      It wasn’t really a question, and her silence answered it anyway. Her bright red cheeks that she was sure were like a flare against the night. A beacon. Her shame and fury and agony, and none of that mattered because she was molten between her legs, too hot and too slippery, and he knew it.

      He knew it by looking at her, and she didn’t know which one of them she hated more then. Only that she was caught tight in the grip of this thing and she had no idea how either one of them could survive it. How anything could survive it.

      “Please,” she said. It was a whisper. She hardly knew she spoke.

      And the worst part was that she had no idea what she was asking for.

      “We’ll get to the begging,” he promised her.

      Giancarlo looked as ruthless as she’d ever seen him then, and it only made that pulsing wet heat worse. It made her ache and hunger and want, and what the hell did that make her? Exactly what he thinks you are already, a voice inside her answered.

      And he wasn’t finished. “But first, I want you on your knees. Right here. Right now. Don’t make me tell you again.”

      * * *

      He didn’t think she’d do it.

      They stood together in the dark, close enough that any observer would think them lovers a scant inch away from a touch, and Giancarlo realized in a sudden flash that he didn’t want her to do it—that there was a part of him that wanted her to refuse. To walk away from this thing before it consumed them both whole and then wrecked them all over again.

      To stop him, because he didn’t think he could—or would—stop himself.

      Seeing her had taken the brakes off whatever passed for his self-control and he was careening down the side of a too-steep mountain now, heedless and reckless, and he didn’t care what he destroyed on the way down. He didn’t care about anything but exploring the phrase a pound of flesh in every possible way he could.

      She didn’t blink. He didn’t think either one of them breathed. He saw her clench her hands into fists, saw her stiffen her spine. He wanted to stop her from running. From not running. From whatever was about to happen next in this too-close, too-dark night, where the only thing that moved was that long dress of hers, rippling slightly against the faint breeze from the far-off sea.

      Then she moved, in a simple slide of pure grace that was worse, somehow, than all the rest. It reminded him of so many things. The supple strength and flexibility of her body, her lean curves, and all the ways he’d worshipped her back before he’d known who she really was. With his hands. His mouth. His whole body. She was his memory in lovely action, a stark and pretty slap across his face, and when she was finished she was settled there on her knees before him.

      Just as he’d asked. Demanded.

      Giancarlo stared down at her, willing back all of his self-righteous fury and the armor it provided, but it was hard to remember much of anything when she was staring up at him, her eyes wide and mysterious and her lips slightly parted, making the carnal way she’d taken his thumb inside her mouth seem to explode through him all over again.

      Making him realize he was kidding himself if he thought he was in control of this.

      As long as she didn’t realize that, Giancarlo thought, he’d manage. So he waited, watching her as he did. The night seemed much darker than it was, heavy on all sides and far fewer stars above than in the skies over his home in Tuscany, and he felt the ragged breath she took. That same old destructive need for her poured through him, rocketing through his veins and into his sex, making him clench his jaw too tight to keep from acting on it.

      He felt like granite—everywhere—when she tilted herself forward and propped herself against his thighs, her palms like fire, her mouth much too close to the part of him that burned the hottest for her.