Page 55

“What are you looking for?” she asks. In the dark part of the screen, I see her reflection, the way her eyes are focused on the video—watching—analyzing. Nosy bitch. I close it out, forcing the video of the ball to fill the space. I keep the volume off.

No words are spoken for a long time, even when I stroke her inner thighs, occasionally traveling upward to give her clit a soft rub, and then pointedly ignoring her responding flinch. The girls in the video get ready, Rosilocks among them, and we both watch as they all do their hair and makeup. My eyelids are hooded as I watch with her, my body somehow both strung tight and reduced to liquid.

It feels like practically no time has passed by the time they all filter out into the ballroom, masks affixed to their faces, but the timestamp tells me an hour has already gone by.

“Pace,” she says, her voice a thin rasp as she reaches for the desk, grabbing the edge of it. “Can you–”

“No,” is my flippant answer, and I adjust my legs to get some circulation back.

She’s wet.

Ten minutes later, she gives a hard exhale, her back sinking. “It’s getting late.”

I look at the time on the leftmost monitor. Barely past ten. “I like this part,” I say, dipping in to smell her hair again. I push my fingers farther between her legs, catching her slickness. “It surprised me–the way you move. I never expected that. I guess that doesn’t come through in photos, does it?”

On the screen, she’s dancing with Lex, their bodies moving gracefully.

She shudders when I spread her wetness over her clit. “It’s been an hour,” she says, thighs trembling.

“You want it to end.”

“Yes.” She says so bluntly that it makes my cock twitch. No softening the blow. No tiptoeing around the truth. She might as well be spitting it in my face.

Humming, I lift a shoulder. “We all want something.”

Her breathing hitches at my tone, and I know she understands when she asks, “What do you want?”

Wicker has fucked her. Lex has seen the most intimate parts of her body. Both of them have filled her up, been inside of her. It’s just like before, seeing her on that dating app and knowing other guys are seeing her too.

I want something that no one else has.

“Tell me you want my baby inside you.”

She stiffens before craning her neck around to gape at me. “Yourwhat?! I-I don’t even know you.”

Rubbing her clit, my lips drag against her ear as I say, “You don’t have to mean it, Rosi. You just have to say it.”

She tips away from my mouth, face twisted into a grimace. “That’s insane.”

I shouldn’t let the anger take hold of me. I never expected her to do it in the first place. Things like this take time. Patience. “Your choice,” I say through clenched teeth.

When I’ve been inside of her for an hour and a half, my fingers playing casually with her pussy, her breaths begin coming in short, closed-mouth pants. “It’s uncomfortable,” she tries, hips wriggling.

I pull my hand from between her legs to clamp down hard on her hips, stilling her. “I still have more than an hour.”

Her jaw hardens. “I can’t stay here until midnight.”

“You will,” I argue, curling an arm around her middle. “Unless you have something to say to me.”

I hold her because I know what’s coming. That flash of fire I see in her reflection isn’t all anger. Some of it’s about the way she’s dripping, her cunt swollen and ripe for me. Still, I bet she lies to herself. I bet when she braces her palms on the desk and rolls her hips, that tight pussy stroking my length, she’ll tell herself it’s just to end this.

But I see the way her mouth parts in ecstasy.

It’s that more than anything that sends me into motion, yanking her into my chest with a fistful of her red hair. “Do you know what it’s like spending night after night alone in a cell?” I hiss, bearing her down on my cock. She winces, but I still feel her responding clench. “Father claimed he couldn’t get me out of a sentence, but he did get me a room to myself. Iaman Ashby after all.” I snort because it’s both true and not. “You learn a lot of ways to entertain yourself, Rosilocks, and my favorite fantasy was coming back here, finding you, and making you suffer the same way I did. No pleasure. Long hours of nothing but pain and discomfort. So you’re going to sit here on my cock until midnight, or you’re going to tell me what I want to hear.”

“I didn’t put you into prison,” she cries, chest heaving.

“You put the fucking heat on me,” I burst, snapping my hips up to punctuate it. “You’re the reason they started the investigation. You’re the one who sent them to my doorstep that day.” Flinging the drawer in front of me open, I snatch up the pair of handcuffs I’d taken from that room in the Hideaway.