Page 14 of Contracted

I tucked my hard length back into my pants, then zippered up. If only my emotions could be hidden away half as easily. It was as if my chest had been cut open to expose feelings that had long ago become anesthetized. I might have wanted to feel alive again, but I’d never allow her to crush my heart in her hands.

It’s too late for that, a snide voice said inside my head.

The bell tinkled on the front door, jerking me out of my bleak thoughts. The half-hour was up already?

Chapter Eight

Delilah

I tried to decipher the fleeting expressions moving across Serafino’s face, but it was like trying to pin down a tent in a hurricane. It made me want to stamp my foot while I shouted with outrage.

He’d been poker-faced until now, and yet I still couldn’t quite read him.

He’d fucked with a ferocity that had been overwhelming even as it’d been oh so right. That he’d treated me with a tender restraint afterward had left me reeling. He was black and white with very little gray in-between.

Then the doorbell jingled and he leaned forward to tug my bikini bottom back into position, covering my bits from anyone else’s view. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. He really was a contrary man.

He stepped out of the dressing room as the salesladies cautiously approached, both of whom looked relieved to find me covered, if it could be called that, in my bikini.

Miss pointy chin forced a smile. “If you’d like to dress back into your, ah, outfit, we’ll bag your purchases.”

“Sure thing,” I said airily, pulling off my bikini bottom and top, then handing them to her.

She held the bikini like she was holding kryptonite, though I didn’t fail to notice her interest as she ran approving eyes up and down my nude body.

Serafino snorted amusement before he advised, “She’ll be wearing the white pants and leopard print top, and one of the new sets of underwear.”

“Of course,” the other saleslady said, averting her gaze. She took the requested clothes off a hanging rack just outside the dressing room, and after removing the price tags, she hung the pants, shirt and underwear on a hook inside. “I’ll go and ring those up along with the rest of your purchases.”

I smiled at her. “Thank you.”

Miss pointy chin glanced down at the bikini I’d handed her, then said weakly, “I’ll get her to ring these up too.”

She turned away and hurried to the register, leaving me naked with the curtain wide open. I couldn’t resist sniggering, Serafino joining in with a dark chuckle that exactly matched my mood.

It was only after we stepped back outside the shop, his arm around my leopard-encased shoulders and his other arm laden with my bags, that I realized I’d never felt happier. It was a good feeling to know that the man I was with wanted to spoil and look after me.

Emilio waited for us beside the car. As we crossed the road, I glanced at the other car parked behind ours, the extra security sending a little skitter of alarm down my spine. I couldn’t forget that Serafino was a dangerous man who attracted other threats like a magnet.

Our driver opened the trunk and helped deposit the bags inside before he pulled open the back passenger door and waited for us to climb in. After he slid into the driver’s seat, he looked at Serafino in the rearview mirror.

“My home in New York,” Serafino instructed.

My apprehension faded and it seemed natural, normal, to snuggle against Serafino’s side as he put his arm around me once again. I must have dozed at one point, not waking until the driver was alternately slowing and speeding thanks to New York’s thickening traffic.

I yawned and stretched as I opened gritty eyes to view the overcast sky outside the windows. “We’re nearly there?” I asked Serafino.

He nodded. “Ten minutes away at most.”

“Oh, good,” I said drowsily. “I could do with a long, hot shower.”

He nodded. “You and me both. Then a leisurely late lunch out on my balcony.”

“Sounds perfect.”

A short while later Emilio turned the car into an underground carpark situated beneath an Italian restaurant. A gate slid open silently as I asked, “You live here?”

“I live in the penthouse suite above the restaurant,” he said.

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