She swallowed carefully, her heart thudding, because she’d never seen him like this. Never. “Your jealousy is.”
He glared. “I am not jealous!”
“What else would you call it?” she asked. “Dragging me out of the club, banning me from talking to every single man on the planet?”
“I am merely ensuring that you behave.”
“Behave?” Lyra spluttered, unbelieving the way their conversation was going. “What is it you think I might do?”
“Perhaps at some point you will decide that another protector is in order?” he asked, and his voice was deadly. “Or maybe you will seek to spice things up? You have all day by yourself when I am working. Not to mention the evenings when I have other engagements. I have never thought of it before now but it occurs to me now, Lyra, to wonder how you fill the time.”
“I shop.”
“All day, every day?”
“I get my hair done, my nails, I have massages, all the things you told me to do. Don’t believe me? Check your card statements.”
“I will, and if I find many hours are unaccounted for, you and I will be having a conversation.”
She gaped. “You’re seriously suggesting I would fuck someone else whilst I’m fucking you?
“I do not know,” he grated. “You tell me nothing about you. Nothing! I know every inch of your skin. Every place to make you sigh and gasp and moan, but not your secrets.” He threw his hands in the air. “You keep them well hidden. You tell me nothing. Not about your background, your family, nothing.”
“And what is it you wish to know?” Lyra asked.
He gestured, his accent thickening even more. “Everything. Your sisters, for instance. Where are they, why do you never see them?”
Lyra’s heart raced. “They’re busy. I’ll see them soon.”
He growled. “That answer makes my point entirely.”
“You’re missing one.”
“And that is?”
Lyra shrugged. “I am the perfect mistress. I do not ask you for anything other than what you give me. I do not ask how you spend your nights when you are not here or who you spend them with. I spend my days ensuring I look beautiful for when you come and see me, and when you do, I pleasure you in every single way you require. There is nothing you have asked of me that I have not done.”
“This is true—”
“I am giving you everything I said I would,” she added. “And up until this point you have done the same. Our relationship is not about secrets and personalities or the like. It is about this. You, me, the pleasure we give one another.”#p#分页标题#e#
“And the money,” he snapped. “Do not forget about the money.”
She sighed inwardly even as those words bounced around in her brain. The money. Wasn’t it always about that? Hadn’t the mission been about that from the very, very start….and yet…this was Andros. Andros who bought her fried chicken, and flashes of fire, treating them all in exactly the same way, as if neither was more important than the other. Andros who, despite his denial, was jealous.
Jealous.
Lyra couldn’t help the way that thought made her heart ache. She turned her back to him and looked over her shoulder. “Undo my dress.”
He narrowed his eyes, bent forward, took the two sides of the slit, and ripped them upwards. Lyra stood perfectly still as the delicate fabric parted from her skin.
“You will not wear these types of dresses again,” he said.
She shrugged a delicate shoulder. “I never wanted to in the first place. I told you that in the beginning.”
He stepped forward so that she was pulled flush against him and rested his mouth on her neck. “You are mine, Rossa.”
“Until you tire of me,” she said—unsure why her heart ached in an entirely different fashion from those words.
“Until then,” he agreed, and bit into her neck. “Until then.”
Chapter Twenty
Later, as Lyra lay sleeping curled up against him, Andros could not settle. He was sated—Lyra was right about one thing, she pleasured him in ways he could barely comprehend—but she was wrong too about many other things. This relationship of theirs, if you could even call it that, was not perfect. The jealousy he had felt seeing her laughing and talking with the boy was like nothing he had ever experienced. It ate at him, clawed at his gut, and that was unacceptable. Andros could not afford to start have feelings for Lyra.
She was his mistress, he her protector.
There must be no tender feelings in their relationship.
He turned over onto his back, seeking to put a little distance between them. It did not work. She turned too and cuddled up against him, draping one leg over his thigh, and placing her arm across his chest. Her hair feathered out across the pillow, and through the myriad lights still shining across London city he could see the perfect redness of it.