Page 58 of Until I Own You

I can feel the way his eyes travel over my skin. Creeping over me and sizing me up.

“You’re a virgin,” he says.

I open my mouth to respond but say nothing.

“If you want to go there, we can, but you can’t get that back after it’s gone.”

“How did you know that?” I whisper.

Seth hesitates. “I just…had a feeling.”

“How did you know?”

“I know everything I can about you. You haven’t had a boyfriend since college, and I know he didn’t touch you like that.”

I screw my face together. “How could you possibly know that?”

“I don’t know. Not in the factual sense but in the feeling sense. This is all this is, Bridget. I can feel that you’re–”

“Fuck you,” I say. “You can’t know anything by feeling it. And now you’ve just made me tell you that I’m–that–” I pull at my restraints. “Let me go. Red. Red.”

Seth puts a hand against my sternum. “Easy. Take it easy.”

My pulse skyrockets. A claustrophobia I’ve never known is taking over. “I want to get out, I want–”

Seth rubs my bare breastbone with one hand while trying to reach the key with the other. “Shhh…I’ll let you out, but you have to calm down. Breathe, honey.”

His touch is warm and comforting. I follow his instruction without thinking.

He releases one wrist from its binding. “I didn’t mean to trick you. I’m sorry.”

I roll my free wrist, then watch as he undoes the other. But he keeps my hand in his, cupping it like a wounded bird.

“I wish I could make you understand how much I’ve thought about you since the moment I met you. Not only have I wanted you like this…” Seth rakes his blue eyes across my body. “But protecting you, keeping you safe. It’s a compulsion I can’t quit.”

I don’t say anything. Because it all makes sense. All the texts and phone calls. The insistence at having my location at all times while I was away at college. Warding other men off. “Why didn’t you just say something?”

“How could I? When we’re…” He closes his eyes and shakes his head.

Silence falls between us. Seth pulls the inside of my wrist to his mouth, kissing it softly, then presses it to his forehead. He releases a deep sigh, the weight of the past decade melting out of him.

I open my palm, letting my fingers tickle through his hair.

“If you want this, you have to tell me in no uncertain terms, Bridget,” Seth says. “I do not take the job lightly to be your first.”

I can’t help smiling, though his expression is distraught. “Seth, I have been saving myself for my Dom.”

His brow is pinched at the middle.

“And if you’ll continue to have me after today, that’s you.”

His jaw steels. The way the persona fits him is as visible as a superhero putting on their cape. A total transformation.

It’s so fucking sexy.

“So, yes, I want you to be my first,” I say. “Under one condition.”

“You have a contract?” he asks with a half-smile that is at the same time smug and tentative.

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