Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
“Do you, though?”
The words come out with a curl I didn’t authorize, low and arch and entirely too interested, and I’d give a year of my life to call them back. They’re the same mistake I made on the platform, the mistake of letting him hear I’d noticed him at all. Don’t, Sensible Blythe says. Too late. He heard it.
“Don’t do that,” he warns me quietly.
“Do what?” I ask, all innocence.
“That.” He crosses the small room at his own pace, and I hold my ground out of pure stubbornness, the same stubbornness that lost me an argument eighteen years ago and learned nothing whatsoever in the interval. “You bait me. You’ve done it since you were twenty-one. You say a thing in that voice and you wait to see if it strikes home, and it does, agapi, that’s the trouble. It strikes home every time.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you—”
The wall meets my back.
I didn’t even feel us move. One second I’m being arch at him from a safe and sensible distance, and the next my shoulders are against the cool paneling and his hands have found my wrists and drawn them up above my head, unhurried, like a man who has all night and intends to use it, and my whole body jolts at the contact in a way I’d give a great deal to disown.
Do something, Sensible Blythe says. Knee him. Bite. Anything.
But I do none of it. I just stand there with my pulse going off like a struck bell and my chin tipped up at him, since tipping my chin up is the only defiance I’ve got left and I’m not about to surrender it.
“Let me make myself clear, agapi.” His voice has dropped into that low pitch I feel more than hear. “Inside this room, you can say whatever you like. Bait me. Bristle. Tell me I’ve never been a gentleman a day in my life, which is true. But the moment we step out that door, you’ll do the job you’ve been paid for in full. You’ll not only act like my fiancée. You’ll act like you’re the luckiest woman alive to be wearing my ring.”
“And if I don’t?”
His lips curve, slow and certain. “There it is. The question you were always going to ask.”
“I don’t care for being threatened.”
“It isn’t a threat, Blythe. Little boys make threats.” His fingers pass once over the racing pulse at my wrist, and he watches me feel it. “It’s a promise. And if you’d like to know exactly what I’ll do when you fail to hold up your end of our bargain—”
His gaze drops to my mouth, and no. No, no, no.
I don’t even need him to finish. I already see it, all of it, the memory of his mouth on the platform replaying itself with no regard whatsoever for my dignity and turning every inch of me feverish.
“You’ll be punished,” he murmurs. “And I think we both know that particular punishment’s been a long time coming.”
I hate that the word goes through me somewhere low and warm instead of somewhere sensible. I hate, even more, that some reckless idiot in the back of my skull is leaning forward in her seat, breathless, wanting with her whole disgraceful heart to find out exactly what he means by it.
A bell chimes through the wall, bright and merciless.
“First dinner service,” comes a steward’s voice from the corridor, muffled and cheerful and catastrophically well-timed, “in twenty minutes, Mr. Karalis.”
He steps back, and I nearly wilt against the paneling, only now noticing I’d been holding my breath the entire time, that my lungs have been off doing something other than their one job.
We come apart like two people who’ve touched a hot stove, except nothing touched, that’s the part that’ll keep me up tonight on my half of the one bed, that nothing touched and I felt the whole of it anyway.
“Twenty minutes,” he tells the glass, his voice not entirely his own. “You’ll want to change. They’ll all be watching how we’re together.”
“And how are we together?” I ask the room, the question coming out smaller than I meant it.
He looks at me then, and for a moment he doesn’t seal himself off, for a moment he just lets me see the thing that’s as inconvenient for him as it is for me.
Then he reaches for his dinner jacket, and whatever I saw is gone, sealed back up behind those black eyes.
“Engaged,” he says smoothly. “Try to remember it’s the part where you’re supposed to like me.” He pauses at the door, and that slow certain curve comes back to his mouth. “And agapi? You’ve got twenty minutes to decide how tonight goes. Play my adoring fiancée out there in front of all of them, or keep baiting me the way you can’t seem to help, and find out at last what it feels like to be punished by a man who’s wanted to for eighteen years.”