Page 45 of Sigma
When the dress is a pool of red around my feet, I stand straight. Resist with great effort the urge to cover myself. “Now what? I’m naked. Is this what you want? To embarrass me? Humiliate me?”
He took all my clothes, and when he provided this dress, he didn’t include underwear. So, without the dress, I’m totally naked.
“You should not be embarrassed or humiliated, Corinna,” he says. “You are a work of art. And art is meant to be displayed. Appreciated.”
“If I so choose—I didn’t choose to strip for you.”
“You aren’t attempting to cover yourself.”
I lift my chin. Endure his scrutiny—which feels less like scrutiny and more like…a tiger eying its next meal. “I refuse to be cowed or intimidated by you.”
He doesn’t move. Only continues to look at me, eyes raking up and down.
“Haven’t you seen enough?” I ask. “May I have something to wear, please?”
He turns away from me, stalks away a few steps. His clenched fists shove into his pockets—a habit to cover a reaction, I think. “I could never see enough.” I barely hear him.
He whirls back to face me, takes a long, almost angry stride toward me, hand outstretched, reaching for my breast—
He stops short. I can see his hand shaking.
His eyes go to mine, and I put all the dignity and pride I have into my gaze: I’m not scared of him.
Which, of course, is bullshit. Of course I am.
The threat of his touch leaves my mouth dry and my lungs empty, my heart pounding, my nerves singing.
His hand drops to his side, balls into a fist. Minute, fine lines of tension etch across his forehead, at the corners of his eyes, in the set of his lips—only because I’m looking at him closely, watching him carefully am I able to see the subtle hints of his emotions.
Such a careful, interior man.
Which makes the outburst about his mother all the more explosive, in comparison.
He clutches the collar of his polo shirt and rips it up and off. My mouth drops open, and a small breath escapes me. Perfection continues under his shirt; the musculature promised at by the set of his shoulders and toned sculpture of his arms comes to breathtaking fruition in the carved-from-marble beauty of his torso. Michelangelo couldn’t have chiseled a more perfect male figure.
Neither overly brawny nor grotesquely lean, each muscle is defined and toned. His slacks sit just at his hips, a line carved in sharp relief angling over each hipbone and beneath his waistband. Abs pop, eight of them, rock hard. With each breath, his torso flexes and releases, ripples.
How dare he look this way? It’s not fair. I want to hate him. But how can you hate perfection? It’s like my body has forgotten what he’s done to me: snatched me from my home in the middle of the night, cut me—albeit I’ve cut myself worse shaving my legs, but still—stripped me naked and gawked at me. Threatened me. Threatened my parents. Forcing my father to sell off his most valuable corporate asset simply out of some bizarre sense of vengeance, the provenance of which none of us have any clue.
Yet, simply removing his shirt has short-circuited my brain.
Momentarily.
I snatch the proffered shirt and shrug into it; the garment barely covers my sex, but barely is good enough for now.
A tableau, then. Apollo staring at me, me at him. Neither of us speaking. Less than a foot between us. Ice and fire war in the space between our bodies.
Then, abruptly, he stalks past me, into his closet, emerging a moment later slipping on a slate-gray button-down over his shoulders. I’m damned and triple damned, but I can’t help but admire the way his torso twists and flexes as he adjusts the shirt and deftly thumbs the buttons closed. His strides are fierce, almost angry. He doesn’t look at me as he passes me. He leaves the shirt untucked, rolls the sleeves up to his forearms.
Pauses in the doorway, finally turning to regard me silently for an intense moment. I can no more divine what he’s thinking or feeling than I could control the weather or fly away from the roof of this tower on my own.
He is a dark god, all coiled fury and coalescing thunderheads, with lightning in his eyes and a capacity for destruction in his hands—like a thunderstorm, there is a certain beauty in the chaos and wildness.
“You are a problem for me, Corinna,” he murmurs. “One I must solve, and soon.”
And then he’s gone, locking the door behind himself.
He takes with him the oxygen in the room, the energy in my body.