Alex gagged on the acidic tang of the bile surging up his throat. “Oh God, I’m sorry.”
He knelt to give her breathing room and unwound her hair from his hand, locks tangling in his haste. A snarl of hair tightened on his ring—the stunning ring she’d made for him, the ungrateful bastard—and he slowed down to keep from yanking on her scalp more than he already had. His hands shook uncontrollably, and he couldn’t grasp the strands.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry.” No wonder she didn’t love him—he was a goddamned monster.
The bit of her forehead he could see on her angled face furrowed at his words. “Why are you apologizing to me?”
“For starters, I just fucking”—he choked out the word—“raped you.”
“Rape?” She scoffed. “That wasn’t rape.”
He punched the closet floor with his free hand, unable to release the knot in her hair and escape the situation.
“You’re stronger than this.” He caressed her cheek. “Don’t let me break you. I don’t want you to be weak.”
At his plea, she seized his forearm, her pointy, claw-like nails pricking his skin.
His breath burst from his lungs, and their bedroom closet’s ceiling now filled his view. Pain radiated from the top of his skull. The agony increased as his back complained about something. What the—?
His body and brain struggled to catch up with the fact that she’d flipped him faster than he could perceive. Before he could inhale, she landed on his abdomen, straddling him. Her nails lightly dug into his shoulders, not enough to break the skin, but enough to let him know she could.
Red streaked through her hair in an angry dance of flames. “Don’t ever underestimate a dragon. We are never weak compared to humans.”
“But you didn’t stop me.”
“Because I didn’t want you to stop.” Her tone effectively added ‘duh’ to the end of her statement. “Choosing to be submissive isn’t weak. It’s a choice I made because that’s what I wanted.”
He stretched his fingers, where her hair had freed itself from his ring, and searched the ceiling as if it held the answers. “But you ran from me. I scared you.”
She hissed. “I ran because I didn’t want to accidentally injure you.”
His gaze fell back onto her. “Oh.”
“You would never be able to force me to do something against my will.” The talon on her index finger lightly slid across his neck, making her meaning clear.
He wanted to believe her. He wanted to absolve himself of this guilt. He replayed his attack in his mind, noting how she’d wiggled and lifted her ass to accommodate him, how she’d flirted with her lashes and lips, how she’d practically begged him to “punish” her, and how she’d come for him.
But did the reality change the fact that he’d completely lost control?
She poked his collarbone. “Whatever you’re thinking, stop it. This does not make you like your father.”
An invisible weight compressed his chest more than the mass of her body on him. “Yes, it does. I’m as much of a monster as he was.”
“No, Alex.” She leaned close, filling his vision. “You aren’t like him. You aren’t him.”
“In the only way I care about, I am like him. I lost control and turned to violence.”
“Dominating and aggressive behavior during sex is not abuse.” She tapped her ribs. “My choice to be submissive with you doesn’t make you a rapist. I consented. I consented before you did a damn thing. And if you weren’t so blinded by your fears, my consent would have been blinking-lights obvious to you.”
“But I shouldn’t have lost control.”
“Why not? You can’t hurt me.” Her brow cocked high at an angle. “And I rather like that you want me that badly.”
His face tightened, his conflicted thoughts warring inside and out. He’d wanted a strong woman to stand up to him, and he’d gotten more than he bargained for with Elaina. Her long-ago demonstration with the steak knife proved he couldn’t hurt her, and she was as strong mentally as she was physically. And that meant she had a point.
He kept thinking of her as human, and she wasn’t. The normal rules didn’t apply to her—or to them together.
The only reason he’d had power in that situation was because she’d given it to him. A gift. She trusted him that much. The idea humbled him.
Even though he still didn’t forgive himself for losing control with her—the one person he didn’t want to lose control with—the imagined weight on his chest floated away.
Her eyes narrowed, hard and flinty. “Now if you’re done beating yourself up about that, let’s talk about how you thought so little of me that you assumed you’d broken me.” Blue fire intensified in her gaze. “Get over yourself. Yes, I care about what you think of me, and yes, I’ve changed my behavior to be with you, but that does not mean I’m broken. Give me more credit than that.” Her claw prodded his collarbone. “Do I make myself clear?”
He couldn’t help a grin. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t smirk at me as though everything between us is magically all better.” She pressed her fist into her abdomen, and her spine bowed. “You still owe me an explanation for that phone call.”
He nodded and then winced, his head aching at the movement.
“The day after you moved here, one of the tabloid reporters called me. I don’t know how he found my direct number, but the guy is good. Too good. He had pictures of us escaping your apartment from the public transportation security cameras. He was going to do an exposé on you—everything from the fact that you were living here to your background, uncovering who knows what in the process.”
Her body stiffened, but she didn’t interrupt.
“The only way he wouldn’t pursue it was if I offered him something better. In exchange for two months of silence, I had to promise him a bigger, exclusive story. I pre-arranged everything with Tiffany’s PR department so he’d get access.”
“That’s why you were so public today?” Her entire body sagged. “You asking me to marry you was just a stunt?”
“No. God, no.” He brushed her cheek. “I do love you, and I do want to marry you. I never lied about any of that. The only thing I did was neglect to tell you that we had an expiration date on our privacy. You have to believe me about that.”
She exhaled, and he couldn’t tell if it was from frustration or resignation. “What was supposed to happen at the end of these two months? And why did you make sure he knew how to spell my name and give him my father’s name?”
“Bait.” His explanation made her eyes widen. “You’ve lived in fear for ten years, and I don’t want you to spend the next ten years afraid too. We need to know if he’s still searching for you.”
She smacked his hand away from her cheek. “Of course he’s still searching for me.”
“Good.” When she jerked back, he rushed to explain. “I pulled some strings to get his name on the terrorist watch list, the No-Fly list, everything I could think of. He’ll never make it past customs to get to you. And the Feds have the firepower to deal with him if he goes full-dragon on them.”
“And then what? Even if their weapons can damage him—which I doubt—how many people would get hurt in the process? I can’t let that happen again. You promised to hide me.”
“I know it’s a risk. But we couldn’t keep you a secret forever. You said you wanted to be free from worry, so rather than wondering and worrying, I wanted to confront the question so we can find a resolution.”
She tensed, her thighs squeezing his sides. “Listen to yourself. You wanted to confront this. What about what I wanted?” Her body shook against him. “What about all the sacrifices I’ve made to prevent humans from being hurt? I asked you to make that promise for a reason beyond just my life and security. You disrespected everything important to me because of what you wanted. This was about you.”
His face heated as if he had a fever. And here she’d said she couldn’t breathe fire.
Maybe confessing would change her mood, at least enough so he could breathe. “You’re right. I didn’t tell you about the exposé and the plan I’d come up with because...”
He needed her. He needed her more than he allowed himself to consciously recognize, as though losing her would destroy him, kill him. As though keeping her close was his reason for living.
Admitting how much he needed her would never be easy, especially not when things were so precarious between them, but if he wanted them to have a chance at moving forward, he had to.
“Because I was afraid of losing you.”
Her muscles relaxed, seemingly from disappointment.
“You talk of all this teamwork and ‘we,’ but you don’t trust me. Not really. That’s what hurts more than anything. I committed to you the day I agreed to start a business with you, yet you lied to me out of a lack of faith in that commitment.”
She’d committed to him? Her simple declaration slapped him upside the head. His fixation on deceiving her meant he’d missed noticing that two months had gone by without her alluding to running away a single time.
Her fingers stretched and curled. “You don’t give me credit for everything I’ve given up for you. I haven’t stolen a single piece of jewelry since we met, even though it would make me stronger in a hurry. Why? Because you wouldn’t like it. Tell me, who’s acting more like a we?”
His stomach hardened like armor, but it couldn’t protect him from the truth. He hadn’t accepted her differences. He’d ignored them to the point of disrespecting her. She’d met him much further than halfway, choosing to change everything and live by human rules to be with him.
In return, he’d given her expensive trinkets, as though he was trying to “buy” her. Amazingly, resentment hadn’t sounded in her tone, only a statement of fact.
“I can fix this.”
She flinched, and her chin trembled. “Don’t you remember? We shouldn’t be together. I don’t love you.”
The back of his throat burned with a rawness he couldn’t swallow away. He still didn’t believe her, but at least his anger had cooled.
An urgent tapping sound caught his attention before he could argue with her claim. “You promised not to leave me, so we don’t need to figure this out right now.” He motioned for them to stand. “I suspect that’s a member of my staff checking on us. Let’s get presentable so we can send them away, and we’ll come back to this later.”
Much later. After he figured out how to convince a stubborn dragon that she was wrong about her own damn feelings.