At the Count's Bidding(21)

                “That’s no choice at all.”

                “It’s a choice, Paige,” he said with lethal bite. “You don’t like it, perhaps, but that doesn’t make it any less of a choice, which is a good deal more than you offered me.”

                “I can’t hurt her. Don’t you care about that? Shouldn’t you?”

                “There are consequences to the choices you make,” he said with a certain ruthless patience. “Don’t you understand yet? This is a lesson. It’s not supposed to be fun.” That smile of his was a sharp blade she was certain drew blood. “For you.”

                For a moment she thought she’d bolt, though it was a long walk to anywhere from high up on this hill. She didn’t know how she kept herself still, how she stayed in one piece. She didn’t know how she wasn’t already in a thousand shattered bits all over this little pull out on the side of the deserted road, like a busted-out car window.

                “Tell me, then,” she managed after a moment, keeping her head high, though her eyes burned, “how does this lesson plan work, exactly? You say you don’t want to force me, but you’re okay with me forcing myself? When it’s the last thing I want?”

                “Is it?” He shook his head at her, that smile of his no less painful. “Surely you must realize how little patience I have for lies, Paige.” He let out a small sound that was too lethal to be a laugh. “If I were to lift your dress and stroke my way inside your panties, what would I find? Disinterest?”

                Damn him.

                “That’s not the point. That’s biology, which isn’t the same thing as will.”

                “Are you wet?”

                It wasn’t really a question, and her silence answered it anyway. Her bright red cheeks that she was sure were like a flare against the night. A beacon. Her shame and fury and agony, and none of that mattered because she was molten between her legs, too hot and too slippery, and he knew it.

                He knew it by looking at her, and she didn’t know which one of them she hated more then. Only that she was caught tight in the grip of this thing and she had no idea how either one of them could survive it. How anything could survive it.

                “Please,” she said. It was a whisper. She hardly knew she spoke.

                And the worst part was that she had no idea what she was asking for.

                “We’ll get to the begging,” he promised her.

                Giancarlo looked as ruthless as she’d ever seen him then, and it only made that pulsing wet heat worse. It made her ache and hunger and want, and what the hell did that make her? Exactly what he thinks you are already, a voice inside her answered.

                And he wasn’t finished. “But first, I want you on your knees. Right here. Right now. Don’t make me tell you again.”

                * * *

                He didn’t think she’d do it.

                They stood together in the dark, close enough that any observer would think them lovers a scant inch away from a touch, and Giancarlo realized in a sudden flash that he didn’t want her to do it—that there was a part of him that wanted her to refuse. To walk away from this thing before it consumed them both whole and then wrecked them all over again.

                To stop him, because he didn’t think he could—or would—stop himself.