Page 39 of Twisted Addiction

The mattress dipped as he moved closer.

His warmth pressed against my back, his breath a whisper against my neck. “You’re not built for silence, Penelope. Every time you say you’re fine, you sound like you’re breaking.”

“I’m not breaking.”

He didn’t answer—just let his hand rest on my waist. The weight of it was grounding and suffocating all at once.

“Don’t,” I breathed, the word barely making it out.

“Why?” His voice was steady, but there was something dangerous underneath it. “You don’t want me to touch you, but you don’t move away either.”

I swallowed hard. “You don’t want to touch me. You just want to remind me you can.”

That earned a quiet laugh, low and humorless. “You still think everything I do is about control?”

“Isn’t it?”

“No,” he said after a pause, his tone shifting—rougher. “Sometimes I touch you because it’s the only thing that reminds me you’re still here.”

The admission knocked the breath from my chest.

For a moment, I almost turned to look at him. Almost.

But then his fingers tightened slightly on my hip. “You used to reach for me,” he said, voice low. “Now you flinch.”

“Because you hurt me,” I whispered. “You made me afraid to want you.”

He exhaled slowly, his breath fanning across my neck—a warm caress that sent tendrils of heat curling through me, pooling low in my belly.

“Then hate me all you want,” he murmured, “but don’t pretend you don’t still feel this.”

The air between us thickened—part anger, part ache.

I wanted to push him away. But instead, I stayed still, every nerve pulled taut between memory and need.

“Dmitri...” I said finally, my voice barely there. “Let go.”

Instead, he moved closer.

The closeness was electric, his body a furnace against mine, awakening a longing I hated to acknowledge.

My thighs clenched instinctively as I felt him harden, his arousal pressing insistently against me, a slow, deliberate poke that set my nerves alight.

Images flooded my mind—unbidden, vivid—of our first and only sex, his hands tearing my clothes away, his mouth devouring me with a ferocity that left me trembling, his hips thrusting with a rhythm that claimed every inch of me.

My body betrayed me, a rush of wetness between my legs as the nightmare’s grip loosened, replaced by a pulsing desire I couldn’t ignore.

“Tell me to stop,” His voice pulled me from the haze, grounding me in the present. “Say the word, Penelope.”

I didn’t answer, afraid my body’s reaction would give me away.

He drew in a slow breath, his chest rising against my back. “You can’t, can you?”

My throat tightened.

I needed to break it—the pull, the heat, the invisible chain that always seemed to draw me back to him.

“Is Giovanni out?” I asked, my voice cutting through the tension.