“You had no right to do what you did back there,” she finally forced to say, needing to break the silence. “I agreed to remain your wife, but I’ll be damned if I let you continue to treat me like your property. I am done enabling your sickening need to demean me at every turn.”
“That place is not somewhere you should be working. You demean yourself by working there,” he quietly countered. “It is beneath you.”
“It’s the only choice you’ve left me.”
“Because your place is at home with our son. Why work when there is no need for it?”
“I like working. In fact, before you came in and ruined what I had, I was happy working at the brokerage firm. But then again my happiness has never mattered to you, so why should it now?”
“Your happiness…” he trailed off, voice weighed with emotion that he would not convey. He said nothing after that until the car drove past the wrought iron gates and slid quietly into the circular driveway. Eden barely gave him time to stop the car before she jumped out, her shapely legs carrying her as fast and as far away from him as physically possible. But he quickly closed in on her, long legs eating up the head start she’d gained on him. When he caught her, it was to draw her into his inescapable hold, his arms spanned her waist, and wrapped tightly around her with his unyielding strength. And before she could protest, he took possession of her lips, covering her mouth with a desperation that thundered in his chest. The whimper she made, from deep in the back of her throat, was a protest that thawed to helplessness; the deep, gnawing need to have him close, to have him possess her this way, was all that mattered. He tasted of whiskey and apples and something distinctively Dominic, a taste that she feared she was now addicted to. While she clung to him, Eden followed his lead, where his tongue brushed up languorously along her own she reciprocated, the sensual feel of their tongues melding elicited a groan from him and she sucked in a breath as he practically picked her up so that only her sneakered toes skimmed the waxed floor.
He dove in deep, kissing her with savage hunger, the luscious strokes of his tongue and lips were unimaginably provocative. In a move driven purely by passion, Eden reached between them to grasp at the erection that stabbed at her abdomen, and he sucked in a breath, breathing her lust into him. His hand came over hers, wrapped around her hand and held it there, over his hard, thick, straining erection that pulsed between them. The air between them was like it fuel, and with only a spark, it would detonate, blowing them both to smithereens. Doing something that shocked them both, he shoved away from her with enough strength that he stumbled back a few steps. “If I am to respect the terms of the contract, you cannot do that again, Eden,” he warned jaggedly, his breath coming out sharp and fast. He looked every bit as ruffled as she felt, if not more so. “There is only so much provocation a man can take before he is driven to devour his temptation,” he pronounced, his voice returning to normal, but the color that remained high on his cheeks was telling of his current state. To see him so affected, so undeniably unraveled was entirely refreshing for Eden.
“I…thank you…”
He tossed her a disparaging look; the sneer that tugged his full mouth upwards was not pleasant. “For not devouring you like the big, bad monster you’ve made me out to be?”
“I didn’t make you out to be anything that you weren’t already, Dominic,” she snapped, not understanding him at all. How could he kiss her so thoroughly one second and be this condescending jerk the next? He mystified her in the same way that he frustrated her and made her wish for a blunt object with which to knock him out with when he behaved like the proverbial asshole, like now for instance. Deciding that she’d had her fill, Eden turned on her heel to leave.
“It matters,” he called after her and stupidly she turned to find him standing right in front of her.
“What?”
“Your happiness,” he began roughly, “it matters.”
Eden regarded in him silence, unsure of how to take the admission, but knowing by the expression on his face that it hadn’t been easy to admit. She didn’t trust that he wasn’t playing her, but what more could he possibly want from her when he had exactly where he wanted her? With the many chances he’d had to proceed in taking her treacherous body to bed, he’d shown astonishing restraint, the likes of which Eden would’ve thought impossible a year ago. “Why now? When it never had before?”
“You had my wealth. You were happy with what I gave you.”
Eden stiffened. “You can’t possibly be that clueless, Dominic.”
“You married me for my money,” he imparted with biting scorn, the sardonic angling of his dark brow daring her to refute the claim.
“I married you because I was desperate, yes, and I needed your money to get me out of debt. But do you honestly believe money, jewelry, even this mansion was what I needed to make me happy? Do you honestly believe that this is what I wanted my marriage to be like? This cold, unfeeling, back and forth that has left nothing but resentment and hate? A husband is supposed to love, cherish and protect his wife, not parade her around like arm candy to prove his manhood. Do you have any idea how what it felt like when you made perform in front of your friends?”
She was so furious that she was shaking from it. Years of pent up resentment burbled up like vomit, burning her throat, impatient to find its mark. She hated the tears of frustration that stung her eyes and made her look weak in front of him, but she persevered, needing to get her point across, needing him to understand an ounce of the animosity that thrashed through her veins. “Not once in the five years that I’ve known you have you made me feel anything but degraded and worthless, and trust me, I don’t blame you completely for it, because I stupidly allowed you to treat me that way, to take away my self-worth. Did you even ask yourself, once in the year that I was away, why I left? Why I needed to get away from you? Because it sickened me to be around you. It hurt, in the worse way possible to be around a man who thought of me as nothing more than two convenient holes.” She angrily swiped at her cheeks with trembling fingers and met his shadowed gaze. “You didn’t know me when you married me, Dominic, and you know me even less now.” She spun on her heel and ran up the grand staircase, disappearing around the corner soon after.
Dominic had lost count of how much he’d had to drink, but with every trek made to his liquor cabinet he found himself stumbling a little more each time, until he grabbed the nearly emptied decanter and plopped down into the high back wing chair that served as his final resting place. He’d believed getting drunk to the point of incoherence would’ve tempered the incessant echoes of memories knocking at his temples, but the finely aged whiskey only intensified those emotions, those unwanted memories, and Eden’s condemning words served as the battering ram that shattered the dam, allowing hell itself to run rampant inside Dominic’s core. There was nothing good about him, nothing soft and sweet that he could provide for anyone. Sentimentality, love and anything resembling the gentle side of human emotion had been beaten, burned and scared out of him by the only person in this world who should’ve been the one to protect him. The most harrowing part about it all was that Dominic knew he’d deserved what his mother had done to him. There’d been something inherently wrong with him to provoke such mistreatment. Dominic was damaged, rotten to the core, and he’d been dealing with that truth for as long as he could remember. He’d shut down everything and abandoned what remained of his heart in the bareness. He hadn’t recognized the emptiness, the desolation, until recently when he’d taken Liam into his hands and held a part of himself. He hadn’t realized how much he’d hungered, how deeply he’d craved that of which he’d never had. His son was the catalyst, but there was only having him here, being able to see and hold him, stirred a change in Dominic that he now wanted but did not know how to grasp it.
In the pin drop silence, with nothing interfering with his self-reflection but the sound of his own breathing, Dominic could barely attempt to contemplate the atrocities he’d committed against the woman who’d entrenched herself into his bloodstream so thoroughly. It had been easy to brand her the coldhearted gold digger because then he would not need to reflect on his own insecurities, on his own failings as a man, a man who still very much had the mentality of the child who’d been locked away in that crawlspace years ago, for days on end. He’d purposely mistreated her, manifested his internal agonies on her so that he wouldn’t need to face the issues at hand. She’d been his own personal whipping girl, the more he’d demeaned her, the more he’d demoralized her, the easier it had been to hide from his own demons.
His cowardice sickened him. He’d defiled her in his this room, had allowed other men to lay eyes on her while he’d forced her to pleasure him, and she’d done it because he’d left her no other choice. The scope of his depravity incurred self-loathing the likes of which Dominic had not felt since childhood. In one swift move, he threw the glass with enough force that it shattered against the adjacent wall. He swiped a frustrated hand across his face, he’d destroyed her…them, a marriage he had not wanted but was now desperately clinging to because, despite the misery he’d imparted, it was the only thing sustaining him. She and the boy were the only things that filled the emptiness.