Page 128 of A Touch of Chaos

Her brows lowered. “What?”

He averted his eyes. “I’m not sure I like when you kiss me or fuck me and tell me you’re grateful.”

“You don’t like it…but you fucked me anyway?”

Her tone set him on edge. It was full of rage, but that was okay, because he could match it.

“I fucked you because I wanted you,” he said. “I fucked you because Ilikeyou. Because I’d like to fall in love with you, but I don’t fucking trust you, and it has nothing to do with Theseus and everything to do with the fact that you regret me every time you have me.”

A strained silence followed his words. Now that they were out, he wasn’t sure why he had said them at all.

Beside him, Ariadne was still. She wasn’t looking at him either. She’d turned her face away and was staring straight ahead. After a few seconds, she threw off the blankets and scrambled out of bed.

“Ari—” Dionysus said, doing the same.

She was at the door when she whirled to face him.

“You think I regret you?” she asked.

“Yousaidso!” He inched toward her. “And even if you hadn’t, I would know.”

“You would know? Can you read minds? Is that another power you failed to tell me about?”

Dionysus ground his teeth. “Every time we have sex, you distance yourself.”

“We’ve had sextwice!” she seethed.

“And when we came back from the island, you ran.”

“I didn’t run. I’m here, aren’t I?”

He swallowed, and when he didn’t say anything, Ariadne shook her head, lifting her arms in a frustrated shrug. She turned to the door.

“So you’re going to run now?”

She froze. His heart beat hard in his chest as he waited for her to decide, and finally, she turned to face him with such fire in her eyes, it ignited the one smoldering in the pit of his stomach.

“Fuck you.”

He thought she would leave then, but instead, she closed the distance between them, and then her mouth was on his and her arms around his neck. Dionysus drove her back into the door and lifted her into his arms. His arousal pressed into her naked flesh, and then he was inside her again. He paused for a moment, unmoving, his forehead resting against hers.

There was a part of him that questioned what they were doing and if it was right. Was this just some challenge Ariadne wished to win?

He felt her hand splay across his chest, and his words built up in his throat as she whispered, “I don’t know what you want from me.”

He swallowed hard and then drew back to look into her eyes as he answered, “I just want more of you.”

Once the words were spoken, he couldn’t take them back, and the only reason he would want to was that it had just now occurred to him that maybe she had nothing more to give at this very moment. If that was the case, he would accept anything, take anything.

What she offered was her lips and her tongue as she kissed him again. It sparked some kind of frenzy inside him, a thing he could not take control of. His hands bit into her skin as he held her pinned against the door. Each thrust seemed to steal the breath from her lungs, yet he could not get deep enough.

He peeled her away from the wall and tumbled into bed, hips grinding and thrusting, and she took it all, her nails scraping along his back and digging into his ass, pulling him closer, pushing him harder. Just when the pressure began to build inside him, his door opened, and it felt like everything happened at once.

Phaedra stood there looking horrified, and he froze.

“Oh my gods,” she said. “I am so sorry!”

“Phaedra!” Ariadne called, pushing against Dionysus’s chest. “Fuck.”

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