Page 97 of Beautiful Secrets

And then what? What happens then, my innocent little rabbit?

“He’ll kill me if I don’t take you back.”

But she just stares.

“And he’ll kill me if I take you to the airport.”

Not a muscle on that exquisite face so much as twitches.

“Anything happens other than me taking you back, he kills me.”

I may have been cocky about it before, but I guess even someone as pseudo-psychotic as me can understand when I’m pushing the envelope.

“Then get it over and done with,” she says.

And maybe—just maybe—if there hadn’t been such outright defiance blazing in her Caribbean Ocean eyes, then I might have put the car in drive and done just that.

Instead, I grab her jaw in my hand. “I’ve had just about enough of you doing a one-eighty every fucking two seconds,” I growl out.

She frowns at me. “It is simple, Cole,” she says in that hot-as-fuck accent of hers. “You take me back. I forgot about you. You forget about me. Easy peasy, no?”

“Just like that,” I murmur, leaning in.

I shouldn’t—it’s fucking dangerous catching even a hint of her scent. It does something to me, the pheromones wafting off her skin. But she isn’t taking me seriously, and she knows how much that pisses me off. Which means she’s baiting me.

Judging from the frown between her sandy eyebrows, I’m pissing her off too.

“Is easy,” she drawls, her eyes dropping to my mouth. “Like breathing.”

Which she stops doing when I shove a hand between her legs and squeeze her pussy right through her pink yoga pants.

“Whoever said any of this shit was going to be easy?” Her eyelashes flutter when I press my palm against her clit. “When life gets easy, you might as well give up.”

Her eyes flare wide. “Then I must have perfect life,” she says. “Because it is never,evereasy, Cole Hendry. And you make it even worse.”

I growl at her, which should have been plenty warning. But she thinks all she needs to do is stare defiantly at me, and I’ll simmer the fuck down.

Fuck that.

If this is the last time I’ll ever see her, then I’ll make sure it’ll take more than a good night’s rest and a hard scrub for her to forget about me.

I yank her seat belt.

It locks.

If she hadn’t instinctively fought the strap, she would have been fine.

But my little rabbit never knows when to stop fighting.

The snare only draws tighter.

It holds her in place for me as I walk, unhurried and smug as fuck, around the hood of the car. Her eyes widen the closer I get to her door.

She gasps when I wrench it open. And lashes out when I reach in and pop open her seat belt. She even dares to kick me—and lands a tidy blow to my chest.

But that’s all she gets.

I guess there’s something dark in my eyes she doesn’t like, because when I grab her face again and force her to look at me, she goes limp.