“What?” That scared the hell out of her.
“Give it all to me. Don’t worry. Don’t think. Don’t plan. Don’t manage. Lay down all your responsibilities and your fears. For a few hours, just feel.”
He lifted her arms and pressed her hands against the wall above her head, palms against the cool stone.
“That sounds so old-fashioned, so—” Dang it, she couldn’t quite think of the right word, not with his heavy body warming her back and pressing her against the wall. “Let the man do whatever he wants to you. Lie still and think of England.”
He chuckled low in his throat. “You won’t be able to lie still, I assure you.”
“It sounds like you’ll be doing all the work. Planning all the things.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Like you’ll have all the control.”
“Yes. That’s exactly it.” His warm lips pressed the place where her shoulder met her neck. “Breathe.” He ran his hands up her arms and pressed her hands flat against the wall. “Trust me.”
A trembling started deep in her chest. “Trust you?”
“Close your eyes. Just breathe.”
“How do I know that you won’t just tie me up and leave me here, helpless?”
“You’ll have to trust me.”
Rox sucked her lower lip into her mouth and bit down.
“Think of this: in three years, have I ever betrayed you? Have I ever not been there for you when you needed me?”
“You screwed a buttload of other women.” Her tone was a little drier than she had meant it to be.
“You were married, or you said that you were. You do not get to be angry about that.”
“Yeah, well, that.” This was why she was not a litigator’s paralegal. Her arguments were stupid when she was all het up.
He said, “I ran myself to the ground, trying to keep my hands off of you, to keep myself from seducing you into breaking your vows.”
He sure thought a lot of himself that he just assumed that she would fall on her back and break her fictional wedding vows if he had crooked his little finger at her.
And yet, the moment he had put his arms around her on the deck, she had fallen for all his games.
She said, “Yeah, screwing all those women must have been rough on you, poor baby.”
His deep voice vibrated near her skin. “But I’ve always been there whenever you needed me, no matter what happened. Together, we assaulted a man in Athens when he tried to hurt you.”
A huge man had grabbed her, thrown her up against a wall, and groped her boobs. She had kneed him in the nutsack, but the guy hadn’t gone down. If anything, it had made him angrier, and the liquor on his breath had made her dizzy. Cash had spun him around and cold-cocked him in the jaw, slamming the guy to the ground.
She said, “Um, yeah.”
“And I carried you across that river in Brazil.”
“I couldn’t believe those other lawyers insisted on that hike. The current was too strong. I couldn’t keep my feet. I didn’t want to see Sting’s rain forest quite that closely.”
“I have always been there when you needed me. I’ve always protected you and kept you safe. I will tonight, too.”
She couldn’t seem to breathe all the way down into her lungs. “But what if you can’t? What if something happens? What if it turns out that I’m allergic to nylon or whatever those ropes are made out of?”
Twisted skeins of ropes hung in a glass-front case, sorted by color and thickness. They reminded Rox of her great-aunt’s knitting yarn stash and yet were so different and freaky.
He whispered, “You’re arguing to argue. First, you tried to argue the law, saying that the underlying theory was retrogressive—”
Yeah, retrogressive. That was the word she had been looking for, dang it. Trust the European guy who had learned high-falutin’ English to take the vocab-heavy Law School Admissions Test to know the twenty-dollar word.
“—but I refuted your logic. Then, you argued the facts of the case, saying that you couldn’t trust me. When I rebutted that with concrete examples, you began to just argue, throwing out a squirrel case about the allergenic qualities of the ropes.”
He chuckled against her neck, and then his teeth nipped her skin. A shiver passed through Rox, and she let her head fall back against his strong shoulder.
His hands curled over hers, high above her head.
“Here is your choice: you said that you wanted me to teach you what goes on in these clubs. You’ll have to give up all responsibility and control to me. You’ll have to trust me to know you, to do it right, and to stop if that’s what needs to happen.”