Bought for Her Innocence(13)

Incendiary heat sparked from that small patch of skin, and she shivered violently. His fingers pressing into her jaw, his body locking her against the seat, there was nowhere for her to go, even if she would have wanted to.

“Or is it that,” he continued, a certain relish to the way he enunciated every word, “your pride and outrage at being in my debt was just an elaborate farce? Did you envision living a cozy and comfortable life off my goodwill and wealth? A rich benefactor was what you were looking for all along? Does Noah get a cut?”

She felt her chest tighten at the very picture he painted in such a honeyed tone, as if he very thoroughly relished twisting the knife as deep as he could.

A soundless scream ricocheted inside her, leaving marks, while she still grappled with the poison in his words, with that savagely satisfied glint in his gaze.

He’s doing this on purpose, some naive, weak part of her moaned.

But she squashed that stupid, wanting, weak Jas.

It didn’t matter how much he believed his own outrageous claim; it didn’t matter if he truly thought her a scheming witch out to snare a better lifestyle.

What mattered was that he had chosen to say those words out loud, that with every word he spoke, with every look he cast at her, Dmitri pushed her away, hated her very presence in his life.

Dmitri, she realized with a painful breath, was so dangerous to her. All she wanted at that moment was to pay his debt, walk out of his life and never see him again. Never subject herself to this hollow weakness, to this constant shame and inadequacy clinging to her every pore.

And there was only one way she could do both: take something she seemed to want with a longing like she never had, and pay off his debt.

The only way, as crazily desperate as it was...

Clasping his cheek, she covered the last bit of distance between them. Pressed her mouth against his, her teeth grinding against his lips. A tremendous stillness came over him while an inferno of heat and shame and fury raged inside her.

She could feel her heart hammer against her chest, like a bullet would ricochet in a closed room, punching holes through it...

And then it slowed down as his gaze clung to hers, a palette of emotions burning through it.

His mouth...oh, that sinful mouth was so hot and soft, seemed to fit so perfectly against her...and everything inside her sobbed and reveled at how intoxicatingly good he tasted. Everything inside her wanted to sink and burrow into him... All this in the space of one jagged breath.

Time itself seemed to come to a screeching halt, and Jas slanted her mouth afresh against his again, arching into his body, and tasted him, again and again...this way and that, moving and lapping while his bristly chin scratched her, while his breath infused hers...

The scent and taste and heat of him exploded inside her and she wanted more of this madness; she wanted him to kiss her back if it was the last thing she knew, so she dug her teeth into that sculpted lower lip...

And he turned into a burst of violent energy around her. His fingers crawled into her hair, molded her scalp roughly and slammed her against him. Her breath shoved out of her lungs.

Sweet victory was hers, she thought, drowning in the storm in his gray eyes...

He growled against her mouth, hot and hungry. And her aching sex pulsed in tune with that feral sound. The sweep of his tongue, the biting grasp of his mouth... It was like a furnace had been stoked into life inside her.

His mouth clung to hers with an erotic heat. Pleasure suffused her every nerve until she thought she would burst from the inside out. That mouth—oh, God, that mouth—it devoured her softness, pressing and plunging, licking and nipping, biting and bruising, one hand splayed against her scalp, one hand holding her shoulder in a bruising grip so that she didn’t lean into him.

A moan, drugged and delirious and, oh, so wicked, rang around the cabin, and she realized that it was she who made that sound. That she was panting and moaning, that a rush of wet heat filled her core, that an ache zoomed from her mouth to every inch of her, that Dmitri’s kiss was more real, more him than anything else he did or said.

It was as if she had found the Dmitri that she had been waiting for all these years, here of all places.

In his kiss.

* * *

Her soft, tentative mouth was like pouring kerosene onto a thin flicker of fire, working him into such a state of arousal that Dmitri felt it burn his throat.

Then her tongue licked his lower lip and his erection became thick against his jeans, as if it could imagine those licks against itself...

It was unlike anything he had ever known in the past decade or with another woman. But it was the vulnerability that she strove so hard to hide in her eyes that captured him.

Her eyes held that perpetual longing for something, that same hungry look that he saw when he looked at himself in the mirror. Something inside her had always calmed him, and now it was as though the effect had grown up along with them, morphed into pure sexual hunger.

It stirred into fire that unquenchable hunger inside him, filled the void that resonated inside him whatever he did, however far he went to fill it...

She would be different, he knew. She would be an experience he would never forget in his life. She would be the drop that would finally quench his thirst.

Because Jasmine knew him, the real him. Not this charming, pleasure-seeking playboy that he had become to hide the reality.

And she would give him everything she had. He could see it in her eyes, in the way her eyes turned molten, in the way her mouth trembled when he came near.

What will happen after that, Dmitri? a voice very much like Stavros needled. Christos, that bastard had really become his conscience over the years, hadn’t he?

And the voice that was full of honor and integrity poured ice-cold water over his lust. Black, guileless eyes wide, she stared at him with a sort of wonder. That very same look that had pulled him back from so many moments of rage.

Except now it was tinged with sexual need.

Hating himself, because her taste was already implanted in his very cells, he wrenched himself away from her. Christos, it wasn’t working. Nothing he did to keep her at a distance was working.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Every word was gritted out through a tight jaw.

Jas tried not to flinch and failed, hurt and shame diluting the haze of desire in her blood. With shaking fingers, she touched her tingling mouth, wondering if she would ever forget the taste of him.

“I’m offering myself to you. I’m saying—” a balloon could be crushing her lungs “—take what you paid for.”

She saw his flinch in the tightening of that concrete jawline, in the slow, almost imperceptible blink of his eyes, as if he was chasing away the shock before it could unsettle him completely. As if nothing he didn’t allow himself to feel was to be borne.

He pushed away from her then, and it was that exaggerated, you-are-plague kind of movement that pricked her. “And what would that be, agapita? See, to this minute, I’m not sure what made Noah think you were worth that atrocious amount of money. What drove another man to bid for you against me?”

Crackling energy arced into life around them, but she was damned if she backed down now. “Have sex with—”

A flare of warning in his eyes arrested the word on her mouth. Coiled energy seeped from his very pores, as if his usual facade was surface-thin now. “Be careful what you say to me, Jas.”

But she couldn’t let him intimidate her now or he would do it forever, she realized. It seemed they were engaged in some kind of power play. God knew how, for she had nothing to take him on with, but no way was she going to back down. “Take my virginity. Call my debt done. God, let us walk away from this impossible situation.”

“So you’re selling yourself to pay off your—”

She slapped her hand over his mouth, a surge of fury washing through her. “Don’t say it, or this time I’ll drive the knife deeper willingly.”

His mouth was a furnace against her palm. Slowly, as if it took him a tremendous amount of willpower, he pushed it back. “Then, what is it you’re proposing, thee mou?”

She looked away, struggling to marshal her thoughts. His taste still lingered on her lips; her scalp tingled with how hard he had held her.

Had it been a knee-jerk response, then, that kiss? Did men inevitably kiss back with such heat when a woman threw herself at them? Was Dmitri no different from all the other men whose lust was so easily inspired by naked flesh grinding a pole?

The thought made her more than a little sick. But the kiss had felt so personal, as though she was getting a part of Dmitri...

It was tragic how little she knew. Although she had a feeling it wouldn’t have come in handy with someone like Dmitri. It had been a week now since he had rescued her and yet she had no measure of him. At all.

“I’ll sleep with you once. Just once to get even.” Somehow, she held his gaze without betraying herself. “I won’t be your mistress, Dmitri.”

“You’re automatically assuming that you fit the role of my mistress, thee mou. You don’t. So don’t lose sleep over it.”

She barely resisted the urge to catch a glimpse of herself in the huge flat-screen monitor as his words ballooned inside her. She knew she was unfit for a lot of things, but this... “I’m not...fit to be one?”

“You’re not my type.”

“I thought anything with a set of boobs was your type.”