Page 81 of Pandora's Pleasure

“You gave me the illusion of power. But you never gave it up.”

“That’s the first insightful comment you’ve ever made. Get your purse. We’re leaving.”

“Why are you like this?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t understand. I thought you and I…”

“Tonight, you were awarded a gift while leaning over that bar, and then again in that very chair. You should be thanking me.”

Her lips trembled and she looked like she was biting back tears.

“It’s true, your father’s ambitions probably won’t be realized.”

“Some part of me believed you might…”

Love her? Was that what she’d been about to say?

My look of astonishment caused her confidence to shrink. She wilted like a flower scorched by the sun—once thriving below dazzling rays only to be utterly destroyed, savagely burned by my words.

“These are precarious weeks. I need you to be obedient.”

“I was coming around to the idea of you,” she admitted.

Push her away.

It will be easier on her in the end.

“You were never anything more than my plaything.”

She looked unsteady on the heels I’d bought her. The same ones I’d taken my time to pick out for her. Placing them on her feet had felt like a sacred ritual.

Destroying Pandora Bardot should be something I savored, a gift to myself and to my family. In order for that to work, I was going to have to get my head back in the right space. Back to the same position I’d held before Pandora had walked through that red door last night and given herself to me—her innocence enduring even after all I’d done to her.

I struggled to drag my gaze away from her beauty, trying to remember a time when I’d once felt nothing for her.

I headed for the door. “I’ll wait for you outside.”

I stood in front of the hotel. Pandora took her time before joining me.

In silence, I escorted her all the way to the chauffeur-driven car parked outside the Ritz. The hotel valet opened the rear door and I assisted her into the backseat. She refused to make eye contact or speak to me.

Seeing her like this shouldn’t have hit me quite so hard, but it did. I felt like I’d ruined a good thing—a goddamned brilliant arrangement.

Not an arrangement, a relationship.

Seeing her in pain made me feel like acid was burning my soul.

“Ms. Bardot’s home, please,” I instructed the chauffeur.

I returned to the hotel, striding fast for the elevator that would take me back to our private suite. I couldn’t go home just yet, for no other reason than it was hard to focus. I was being assailed by too many conflicting thoughts and emotions, and there were no easy solutions.

Clearly, I had been letting my heart do the thinking for me. It was a colossal mistake I wouldn’t repeat.

On my way downstairs the next morning, I tried to come up with the words I’d need to describe the current situation. When I stepped into the dining room and sat down to have brunch, saying“I fucked it up,”probably wouldn’t land very well.

Back at The Ritz, I’d blown up any chance of continuing a relationship with Damien. Before our argument the evening had been magical. I’d reveled in their erotic games, being their plaything, and finding freedom in my sexual desires—fucked hard in that velvet chair while having my pussy devoured at the same time by some secret stranger, who’d turned out to be Theo Tamer, a man just as devastatingly handsome as Damien.